I think that you’re right to focus on the development culture of the Linden Lab viewer. I’ve not been involved in large open source projects for all that long, but even in that short time I’ve seen that it’s easy to open source a project, but much, much harder to build a truly collaborative development culture around it.

In the OpenSimulator project we try very hard to maintain such a culture. I think that it’s much easier for us because we’ve always been an open source project. All our use cases, patches and documentation are wikified, mailing listed or blogged. Moreover, in OpenSimulator no one company even comes close to dominating (and hopefully never will), so there’s no default position where things are much more effectively done within a company for long rather than in public. We’re far from perfect, but I think that we do have a culture where as much of the development process as possible is open, public and collaborative.

Personally, I think that Linden Lab will in fact move in the direction of greater collaboration with the viewer development culture as the potential for this to grow the general community and their own business increases. However, it’s a hard road to get from there to here, involving both process and social changes.

Imprudence is exactly the wrong way to go, and your celebration of it is suspect, given your track record as someone more thoughtful and considerate, and supposedly driven by some notion of public service with this viewer contest of yours.

There is nothing wrong with the search, Dusan. Like so many people, you are stuck on using SEARCH ALL, most likely, it returns all the ridiculous junk the Lindens have put in it, and it becomes useful. Once you stop trying to use SL as Google, and use it as amazon.com with *tabs* you will find it more intuitive. It’s a world. It has classifications. It’s not a big telephone book or search engine. It’s a world. The search functions best with the places tab for finding things because things aren’t on pages, Dusan, they are *in places* and place *matters* in SL.

The open sourcing of the viewer is a sop — it was handed out to these rabidly extremist tekkies in the resident population, and some of their Lindens friends, as something for them to gnaw on while LL lined up its ducks for the broader concept of entirely opensourcing the server code or licensing the connection to the asset servers. That’s all. It can’t be taken seriously on its own terms.

I feel sorry for you spending so much money in what now appears to have been a bid to get the Lindens to notice you and do what you want, and not *really* about finding the best viewer. Again, I thought better of you.

Your whining and attacks on the Lindens now for not grabbing your viewer or getting excited about what three tekkie designer nerds came up with, even being the same kind of nerds themselves, let’s me know that you viewed this exercise ultimately like Impudence — trying to overthrow the publicly-supported viewer to impose your own views, even over the Lindens’ heads, who are the only barrier between the extremism represented by you and your comrades and the rest of us.

And what’s more, you failed to understand the Lindens’ psychology. They don’t want excellence and competition from their residents; that makes them mean and jealous. They want sycophants. Fanboyz.

You’re not supposed to excel, Dusan. You’re supposed to be mediocre, and make it all seem like any bright idea is all theirs.

I’m personally glad my own odyssey in reaching this understanding was faster and far less expensive than yours, when I tried to do a railroad sites building contest in concert with their rail stations building contest. It was a total flop because the Lindens enable griefers to destroy any initiatives like that but also kill it by their own indifference or active snarkiness.

Firefox is a nuisance. It has so many annoyances. You’re blind to all that. It’s paid for by a rich man as a hobby, pretending that things like this in fact are made for free by “thecommunity”. It’s a shill.

The one thing I will agree with you about is the Lindens’ lack of a Big Idea when they tout connectivity for connectivity’s sake. This is the fad now. It’s all about the pipeline and not the content. But that’s because they want to be the only wants to fill in the content.